As Hurricane Ian batters Florida it reminds me of something that happened in my early days at Betfair. Firstly, I hope that everyone is ok as it looks horrendous in Florida atm. Have spent plenty of time there and could not recommend the beaches at Clearwater highly enough.
In our team we were responsible for US Sports and had to ensure that for MLB all start times were correct, pitchers were correct etc. I am not sure of the exact year but it would have been about 2005. August and September were always hurricane season and start times of matches changed a lot. On this day there were matches that had been brought forward about 3 hours. The games had started and were in about the 6th innings when the issue had been spotted. At Betfair if something like that happened we would cancel all bets placed after the official start time.
However, some bookies hadn’t realised what was happening. Skybet was one I remember in particular. I wasn’t betting myself at that time but had friends who placed all sorts of doubles/trebles involving the games in question. The games went as expected and finished an hour or so later. I was just expecting the bets to be voided. These were the days before market creation and settlement was out sourced to the likes of Betradar and BetGenius. Before the days when every match would go in play. They paid out though and nothing more was ever said.
This sort of stuff happened quite often in those days. They just don’t happen these days and if they do, they become obvious really quickly with in running betting available on everything.
ProPunting 